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New Evidence Surfaces in New Orleans Killings

NEW ORLEANS — Early one morning in June 2006, when this city was only half full and in many areas still desolate from the flooding after Hurricane Katrina, five men were shot to death in an S.U.V. in the Central City neighborhood.

The killings sent the city into an uproar, galvanizing politicians, who spoke of “Hurricane Crime,” and adding urgency to the city’s request for hundreds of Louisiana National Guard soldiers to return and patrol the streets.

The criminal case that followed was just as incendiary in many ways, and it ended this past August with a death penalty verdict, the first in a dozen years in a New Orleans murder case, against a 23-year-old man named Michael Anderson. It was a trophy verdict for the district attorney’s office, a sign that law and order had triumphed in one of the city’s most heinous and high-profile crimes.

But there is a problem. New evidence from the state’s key witness released in early January by the district attorney’s office — evidence that the office had for over two years — could put a hole right in the middle of the case against Mr. Anderson.

Richard Bourke of the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, a nonprofit organization that represents Mr. Anderson and others facing the death penalty, routinely pushes for new trials in capital cases. But while these motions are standard practice, and sometimes take up a single page, this one is different, Mr. Bourke said.

Mr. Bourke cited crucial evidence that was never handed over to the defense during the trial, including a videotaped interview with prosecutors in which the state’s central witness contradicts her testimony on significant points.

“We’ve done some meritorious motions for new trial cases,” he said. “But I’ve never seen a case like this. Nobody has.”

On Monday, the first day of the hearing for a possible new trial, prosecutors said that none of the evidence now available was significant enough to have changed the outcome of the jury trial, and said efforts to get current and former prosecutors to testify were little more than a “witch hunt.”

The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office has had a problematic history with capital cases. Of the 36 people sentenced to death in the parish since 1976, more have been exonerated than have been executed — five compared with four — two have been retried and acquitted, and more than half are no longer on death row after their cases were reviewed by the Louisiana Supreme Court, according to an article in the Southern University Law Review by Bidish Sarma, a New Orleans lawyer.

The prosecution of Mr. Anderson has been a trial, in many ways, of the district attorney’s office itself.

At the time of the murders, Mr. Anderson had a significant arrest record, on charges of extortion, armed robbery, drug possession and attempted murder. But he had only two convictions, one for a misdemeanor. The inability to turn the other arrests into convictions made him, in the words of the director of a local police watchdog organization, “the poster boy of what was wrong and what is wrong with the local criminal justice system.”

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Then, nearly a year after Mr. Anderson was arrested, the district attorney, Eddie Jordan, dropped the charges, citing difficulties tracking down — and believing — Torrie Williams, 33, the witness on whom the indictment depended and on whom a trial would depend.

The police department held a news conference lambasting the decision and even produced Ms. Williams, who told reporters she was willing to testify. A city councilwoman called for Mr. Jordan to resign, and the mayor called on the state attorney general to investigate.

LaShanda Webb, an assistant district attorney initially assigned to the case who left the office last year, said she did not consider Ms. Williams to be credible. “No one wanted to touch it,” she said.

“Are we prosecuting cases because of sufficient evidence or because that’s what the public wants?” Ms. Webb said.

After Mr. Anderson’s conviction, Leon Cannizzaro, the current district attorney, called Ms. Williams “the essence of our case,” and proof that people should not be afraid to cooperate with the authorities.

Then, at a hearing in January, an assistant district attorney disclosed that a videotaped police interview with Ms. Williams had been found during an office move. The tape was made shortly before Mr. Anderson’s second indictment, but was never turned over to his lawyers.

In the video, Ms. Williams, sitting at a long table in front of prosecutors and investigators, gives an account that diverges from the one she gave on the witness stand, and which lines up with the testimony of several defense witnesses.

Ms. Williams, who had come down from Baton Rouge with her boyfriend the day before the killings, said in both accounts that she saw the shooting of the five men firsthand. But at the trial, she testified that she had left her hotel room around 3:30 a.m. and had seen the killings by streetlight.

On the tape, Ms. Williams said she stayed in her hotel room late enough to watch the 5 a.m. news, a timeline corroborated by two defense witnesses, including her boyfriend at the time. When she saw the shooting, she said on the tape, there was just enough daylight to see without any streetlights. Given that the murders took place around 4 a.m., this would have been impossible.

Prosecutors at Monday’s hearing argued that the trial jury knew of other occasions on which Ms. Williams had contradicted herself, but that they had nevertheless found her believable enough to convict Mr. Anderson.

A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2010, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: New Evidence Surfaces In New Orleans Killings. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe